Hardware and System Requirements

Rosegarden is a multi-purpose application whose hardware
requirements differ markedly depending on what you're using it
for. Editing, playing and recording MIDI and editing score are
less resource-hungry than recording or playing audio. The use of
multiple audio plugins or soft-synths will especially impact
system performance.

System hardware

As this is a Linux application, the first requirement is
for a PC capable of running Linux.

Any modern desktop or laptop and most netbooks should have sufficient
processing power and RAM to meet Rosegarden's minimum requirements.
However, Rosegarden is fairly memory-hungry, and can demand a lot of
processing power, so the more you can throw at it, the more enjoyable your
experience will be.

You will get far better performance from Rosegarden on any
hardware if you use a Linux kernel that is optimised for
real-time applications; the best way to achieve this depends
on your choice of Linux distribution, but for many
distributions the easiest thing is to look for a "multimedia
repository", "multimedia distribution" or "audio overlay"
tailored to your distribution and install a low-latency kernel
from there.

Audio hardware

Rosegarden requires and uses the ALSA sound drivers to
drive your soundcard. The Rosegarden project itself has no
control over whether a card is supported or not: it depends
entirely on whether the card has ALSA support. To find out
whether your hardware will work with ALSA, look it up in the
ALSA Soundcard
Matrix.

Of course, if you're using an external MIDI device (sound module
or keyboard) you'll also need the appropriate leads and
cables.

Software

Rosegarden runs on Linux, so you'll certainly need that.

Rosegarden requires the ALSA sound drivers for
audio and MIDI support, and you will need the JACK audio server if you want to
do audio sequencing, although it isn't necessary for MIDI.

If you intend to build Rosegarden from source, you will need to install a number of libraries. See the Contributing wiki page for a list.